Frederic Lardinois
Frederic writes about tech. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite). He owns just over a 50th of a bitcoin.
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Latest from Frederic Lardinois
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Google says it sold a Google Home device every second since October 19
Google today announced that it sold “tens of millions of Google devices for the home” over the course of the last year and that it sold “more than one Google Home device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October.” Read More
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Appcanary shuts down its vulnerability scanning service as the team joins GitHub
Appcanary, a Y Combinator-incubated service that helps developers scan the third-party packages and libraries they use to write their code for potential security vulnerabilities, today announced that it will shut down its service on June 1 and that the team is joining GitHub. The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction, but our understanding is that this is… Read More
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Google Cloud launches preemptible GPUs with a 50% discount
Google Cloud today announced the launch of preemptible GPUs. Like Google’s preemptible VMs (and AWS’s comparable spot instances), these GPUs come at a significant discount — in this case, 50 percent. But in return, Google may shut them down at any point if it needs these resources. All you get is a 30-second warning. You also can only use any given preemptible GPU for up to… Read More
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Google is about to force you to use its new Calendar design
Last October, Google announced a redesigned look and feel for Google Calendar on the desktop. Not everybody loves the design (including me, though some people have told me I’m wrong), but soon your opinion won’t matter because Google is about to upgrade your Calendar to the new design anyway. As the company announced today, G Suite users whose admins chose to be on the Rapid… Read More
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Opera now protects you from cryptojacking attacks
Opera today launched version 50 of its desktop browser. Sadly, this release doesn’t come with a cake to celebrate this milestone (not even a tiny cupcake), but the newest release does include a new feature that makes sure that nobody can mine cryptocurrencies in your browser. Read More
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Photosynth returns as a feature in Microsoft’s Pix camera app
Earlier this year, Microsoft shut down Photosynth, its service for stitching multiple images into panoramas and semi-3D models. When it launched in 2008, the service was extremely impressive, but it never quite caught on. Still, it had its fans — and now Microsoft is bringing it back in the form of a new feature in its Pix camera app for iOS. In addition, the Pix app is also getting a… Read More
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Firefox lands on Amazon’s Fire TV
If you own an Amazon Fire TV, you can now use Firefox to browse the web on your TV. As Mozilla and Amazon announced today, Firefox, which joins Amazon’s own Silk browser on the device, is now available for all your browsing needs. “Bringing Firefox to Fire TV is an exciting new way to reach our users and serve up more of the full web to everyone,” said Mark Mayo… Read More
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Ooma acquires AI-powered video camera platform Butterfleye for its home security service
Ooma, the company that’s probably still best known for its VoIP platform, today announced that it has acquired Butterfleye, an AI-powered video camera and security platform that produces a smart security camera for home and business use. Ooma plans to integrate Butterfleye’s camera into its Ooma Home security solution, but the company will also continue to sell the camera under… Read More
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Microsoft starts testing its long-promised Windows 10 Timeline feature
When Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Fall Creators update, one of the most interesting features the company demoed was Timeline, which lets you find and resume your recent activities as you move between PCs and iOS and Android phones. It’s basically a global task view, backed by Microsoft’s cloud services. Read More
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Convercent raises $25M to keep companies out of ethical quandaries
Convercent, a company that provides ethics and compliance software to businesses, today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Rho Ventures. Additional investors include Sapphire Ventures and Tola Capital. The idea behind Convercent is to give businesses the tools to, in MBA-speak, “operationalize ethics.” Read More
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Dgraph raises $3M for its open-source distributed graph database, hits 1.0 release
Dgraph is an increasingly popular open-source distributed graph database that uses a version of Facebook’s GraphQL as its default query language. Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in funding from (this includes a $1.1 million seed round raised last year). In addition, the company announced that its flagship database has hit the 1.0 stage. Read More
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Open Garden wants to give you tokens for sharing your internet connection
Open Garden launched its mesh networking platform at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. Since then, the company has gone through a few iterations and found unexpected success in its Firechat offline messaging service. Now, it’s ready for the next step in its evolution. The company now wants to make it easier for anybody with an Android phone to share their Wi-Fi connections with anyone who… Read More
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Mozilla’s Mr. Robot promo backfires after it installs a Firefox extension without permission
If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week. The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. Read More
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With $10M in new funding, Huddly launches its smart GO camera for video conferencing
Huddly has built a smart camera that only has one mission: make your video meetings more productive. Now for the most part, you probably don’t think much about what camera you use for your video conferences. They are pretty much all the same, after all. But Norway-based Huddly thinks its smart wide-angle GO camera, which is now shipping for $499 through its resellers and which will… Read More
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Assembla’s new iOS app lets developers manage their repos on the go
Software development isn’t exactly something that naturally lends itself to mobile. Who, after all, wants to code on a virtual keyboard and a small screen. But you don’t need to be bound to a desktop or laptop to manage your code or to compare the latest revisions of a file while you’re on the go. It’s maybe no surprise then that Assembla, a cloud-based enterprise… Read More
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Andrew Ng’s Landing.ai wants to bring artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry, starting with Foxconn
AI pioneer Andrew Ng is probably best known for his work on the Google Brain project and for leading Baidu’s AI group. After leaving Baidu earlier this year, it wasn’t quite clear what exactly Ng was up to, but today he announced the launch of Landing.ai, a new startup that focuses on bringing artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry. Read More
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Instana raises $20 million for its microservice monitoring and management service
Instana, a company that helps enterprises monitor and manage their microservice deployments with the help of automation and artificial intelligence, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round led by Accel, with participation from existing investor Target Partners. This brings Instana’s total funding to $26 million to date. Launched in 2015, Instana bills itself as… Read More
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Google Assistant is coming to older Android phones and tablets
The Google Assistant has long been available on most modern phones and tablets. But given the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, many older devices will never get the newer versions of Android that feature built-in support for the Assistant. Google is now bringing support for its voice-activated helper to phones running Android 5.0 and tablets running Android 6.0 and 7.0. Read More
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Adobe Lightroom’s auto setting is now powered by AI
Adobe launched an update to its suite of Lightroom photo management apps today that, among other things, brings a new machine learning-powered auto setting to the service. The new auto setting uses Adobe’s Sensei AI platform to analyze your photo and compare it to the thousands of professionally edited images in its catalog (including, I assume, those in Adobe Stock). Then it uses… Read More
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Google Maps will soon tell you when it’s time to get off your train or bus
Google is about to launch a small but useful update to Google Maps that will give you live guidance and interactive real-time notifications during your journey. The idea here is to give you real-time updates while you are on your transit journey. These updates will appear in the Google Maps app and, maybe most importantly, on your Android lock screen. Update: this is now live and available… Read More
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